How To Develop A Medical Weight Loss App

Thinking about creating a weight app as part of your healthcare development services? In this post, we study the market and look at the top 2022 products. 

Introduction. Market overview. Why do we need these apps? 

As you can see in the picture above, according to the researchers, the US fitness app market size is steadily growing every single year. Obesity is a great problem, and as people see the positive effects of using the best weight loss apps, the demand for such software naturally rises. 

As for the most popular devices, you can see that smartphones were the number one choice last year, followed by wearables and tablets. 

Have you ever imagined what your ideal diet and weight loss tracker would be? 

How To Develop A Medical Weight Loss Software? 2022 Must-have Features 

They are quite obvious. 

• Counting Calories

The must-have of every weight-loss app. No discussion. You just need to make it easy to use and accurate. 

• Weight Loss Records 

Tracking the number of pounds/kilograms lost is the main reason we created the app. It is motivating to see your progress, and it gives the feeling of fulfillment.  

• Personal Menu and Workout Plan

Following your diet plan faithfully is the way to steady weight loss and further fitness. What you eat and how you move define how fast you will reach your goal. Thus, a personal plan for both factors is the key, and to develop the best weight loss app means providing this feature in the most efficient form. 

Yet, plans are challenging for many people, which is why we need to include another feature in your app that gives inspiration and support. 

• Motivation and Education 

Weight apps should be motivating and supportive digital companions. Different kinds of rewards for fulfilling daily exercise or every pound lost is a great source of enthusiasm and desire to keep going. 

Making Your App Unique. More Functions To Consider. Getting Inspired From The Best 

Losing weight is far deeper than just counting calories and temporarily dieting. It is the lifestyle where there is enough focus on physical workouts, mindfulness, nutritional education, and quality sleep. In case you want to add more features to your weight loss software, we chose the best apps from various categories that can be a useful bonus to your users. Let us see how they function in the top-of-the-market examples. 

Apple Fitness Plus is one of the best apps for workouts, like a saving grace during the Pandemic. There are tons of workouts with lots of varieties to them, like dance, rowing, cycling, HIIT workouts, pilates, etc. They have fun and personable trainers who push you but also give you modifications if you need to tailor things back a bit. They also have tons of add-ons such as new meditation practices as well as celebrity time to talk to guest speakers like Prince William and Sean Mendes. And what’s cool is that it syncs with your Apple Health app, where you can see a summary of all your different stats and trends after each workout. On top of that, you can share the membership with your family members if you’ve already enabled family sharing through your Apple account. 

One negative knock comes out of this: the app is only accessible through Apple devices, and it only works if you have an Apple Watch Series 3 or later. Apart from that, there are no major issues; it is reliable and updated weekly; and it can be the only workout app that you need to stay fit at any time and any location. 

Talking about nutrition, one of the most popular apps in this category in 2022 is Yummly. For those who want to step up their kitchen game, the app offers tons of recipes to choose from. Different trending dishes or various cuisines styles. Once you pick your dish or recipe, you can see all the ingredients you need for your desired dish. Moreover, you see all their nutritional facts for the stated serving sizes. What is neat is if you scroll down you can also see the different reviews from the other users who took a stab at making that same dish. They also have good quality video-guided cooking sessions that you can follow step by step to create a new or favorite dish. You can plan your meals for the week and also automatically translate those ingredients to a digital grocery list on your phone that you could check off when you are shopping for food. Some users wish that it would be nice if possible to keep track of foods they were eating and see the collective daily amount of carbs, proteins, and fats like some fitness apps do. But overall it is fun. 

Losing weight also depends on the quality of your sleep, and one of the coolest SLEEP TRACKING tools is offered by Woop. However, to use the actual app you need to have the Woop device itself because it is not a stand-alone sleep tracker. Yet its sleep monitoring is wonderful. It is tracking your overall sleep performance, your actual time spent in bed awake versus sleeping and you could see how many interruptions you had when you were sleeping, and you could track your sleep efficiency. The recovery tracking feature is nice, it focuses on your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, your quality of sleep, and your respiratory rate to give you and your doctor a collective recovery score out of 100% day by day. The sleep coach feature suggests bedtime and the total amount of sleep needed for you to perform your weight loss at your best. And there are also smart alarms to wake you up when you have your optimal amount of sleep, etc. Performance assessments come weekly and monthly and they let you know what habits and behaviors lead to your quality sleep over time. 

With the growing interest in wellness and mindfulness over the last few years, there are a lot of apps for MEDITATION and MINDFULNESS. Social media sharing, various exercises, techniques on breathing, guided meditation, and methods for relaxing are the most important features to include here. And my mind everything has to be ranked by levels. 

Making Your App Profitable

When it comes to making your medical weight loss app monetized, there is one major piece of advice – avoiding free versions and free functions will make your product fail. If you look at the comparison between paid and free apps, here is what it looks like:

Source: Statista

Be generous, let your audience try it, and fall in love with it by creating a wonderful interface that is pleasant, modern, and minimal. Study what your competitors lack and include features to stand out. This is the stage where you can introduce Subscriptions. 

Your development team will also offer to apply other strategies like ads banners or other integrated ads methods, advanced features, prime versions, and more.